Higher Education Institution

Teed started providing help and advice to Universities on their business continuity planning in 2001 and this has continued to be an area of interest ever since. We have now worked with a number of the UK's leading universities and have a very good understanding of the issues facing higher education institutions (HEIs).

The threats to Business Continuity (BC) for HEIs are wide and varied. We have provided advice and assistance for responding to a loss of premises, loss of IT or communications, loss of information, threats to international travel, student demonstrations, pandemic planning and security issues.

Our approach to projects for educational organisations is somewhat different to our larger corporate clients. We recognise that the available budget for obtaining external assistance and implementing solutions will be limited. We have designed tailored methods that suit the educational environment and our efforts are focused on providing input that will allow the majority of the work to be rolled out using internal resources.

In some instances we will undertake business impact analysis interviews for select schools and departments and then provide the methods and training that will allow all other areas within the institution to be taken through the same process.

When developing IT Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, we recognise that individual IT service owners within schools and departments are often the most appropriate representatives to contribute to BIA discussions as they will have a good understanding of expected recovery times and feasible workarounds for their area.

We have worked with university Estates and IT departments in helping them to design cost effective BC & DR strategies to ensure that minimum resource requirements can always be satisfied. Particular emphasis is given to understanding recovery requirements for critical times in the academic year, e.g., clearing, registration and examinations.

Teed's input and experience means that lessons learned by similar organisations are taken into account and that solutions are appropriate and cost-effective. With innovative thinking it is often possible to avoid using costly third party services and make best use of the campus facilities available. This process is helped by ensuring that workarounds have been established by schools and departments that would buy more time and allow a flexible solution to be adopted.

We have been working with universities for a number of years and in recent projects have noticed that there is increasing pressure to maintain student satisfaction. Much credence is given to a university’s performance rankings which can make a difference to the number and quality of student applications. BC planning objectives are now more likely to include a focus on ensuring that the student experience is not impacted by a disruptive incident.